![Very Happy :D](./images/smilies/icon_biggrin.gif)
After reading what feels like every thread on this forum, some of them multiple times (cough...'Show me your kitchen'... cough), I feel like we're finally ready to start our own build thread. I'm a little fuzzy on the dates, but to be honest it hasn't been very long since my partner Dan and I decided to buy a house together, let alone start building! We spent a few months trawling real estate websites
looking for something within our budget of $350,000, but this mainly left us depressed and frustrated. Fortunately for us, Dan's brother finished building a house while we were in the process of looking for something. We couldn't believe that he had 4 bedrooms and 2 living areas, all of it brand new, when we had been looking at 3 bedroom shockers within the same price
range.
It didn't take us long from there to:
- July: Meet up with the same local builder that Dan's brother had used
- August: Find an 800m2 block and put in an offer for $115000. The real estate agent sounded pretty doubtful that it would be accepted... but we got the call an hour later letting us know it was all moving ahead!
- October: Have our block settle after two long months. Go on a month long colours and selections rampage and come out mostly intact. Would you believe that there was no angst until we got to the lighting?? Who would have thought lights of all things would be stressful?
- November: Signed a contract and sent plans to council.
The Block!!
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Here is a picture of our site plan:
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And here is a copy of our house plan:
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Not very large or fancy, but this is just our first little home and we didn't want to risk a large mortgage. We have made quite a few changes from the initial plan though, hopefully none of them to our detriment! Fortunately for us we could change things as much as we wanted to, all we had to keep in mind were that every m2 costs. The main thing we did was get rid of the garage as without it we had a lot more room to play with in fitting both the house and Dan's shed on the block. This also allowed us to add a bit of extra space to our living space, master bedroom, ensuite and WIR. I also got the walk in pantry I'd always wanted! Our original plan also had the laundry as part of the kitchen, so we moved it next to the bathroom and added all of that extra space into the kitchen. Finally, we added some extra concrete around the alfresco (the red part) to give us a little more room when entertaining. Hopefully when we see it in the flesh, we'll love it as much as we do on paper!